We simply became the slaves of our enemy. We are building their homes on our villages, and we clean their streets. Do you know what this does to you when you have to be the slave of your enemy in order to survive? No, you will never understand how painful it is unless your country is occupied by another force. Only then will you learn how to watch in silence pretending not to see the torture of your friends and the humiliation of your father; do you know what it means for a child to see his father spat at and beaten before his eyes by an Israeli soldier? Nobody knows what happened to our children. We don’t know ourselves except we observe that they lose respect for their fathers. So they, our children, the children of the stone as they became known, tried the Intifada – the Uprising. Seven long years our children were throwing stones and being killed daily. Nearly all our young men [and many of our young women] were arrested and the majority [were] tortured. All had to confess. The result was every one suspected that all people were spies. So, we were exhausted, tormented and brutalised. What else could we do to return to our home? We had almost forgotten that and all what we wanted was to be left alone. (In Abdo 2014: 77)
This is the history that most counter-narratives choose to ignore, and this is the history which Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere insist on remembering and reminding the whole world about (Abdo 2014: 77). This is one memory among millions of others which make up the Palestinian collective recollection of the Nakba: the history of their scattering, of life in exile, of the obliteration of their collective identity, and of the destruction of their homes. This is a history regarding how Israel became a state in 1948. The contradictions between the indigenous culture, that of the colonized and occupied, encourages and fosters resistance, and that of the imperialist culture, which criminalizes anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles and resistance and transforms the latter into terrorism, are the background of the Palestinian resistance, which has produced a political-cultural history (Abdo 2014: 84‒85) and a prolonged struggle for liberation. As Fanon (in Abdo 2014: 618) argued, “If the settler colonial work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native, the native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler”.
This section shows clearly that the erasure of Palestinian suffering in the Israeli narrative is well-planned and widely publicized; but, as the next section clearly argues, the ongoing oral history projects in Gaza build for a positive future, in terms of refuting the Israeli narrative and emphasizing the Palestinian one.
FUTURE OF ORAL HISTORY
As the research clearly sets out, Palestinian oral history has a long precedent in the culture of Palestine, stemming from a broader oral traditon. Projects to record and preserve this oral history in Gaza started at the end of the twentieth century, to create a line of defence against erasure of memory and culture among the Palestinian people. Regarding the future of oral history, I approached two of the earliest oral history projects in the Gaza Strip: the Tamer Institute for Community Education and the Oral History Project in the Islamic University of Gaza. To start with the Tamer Institute for Community Education, it is a Palestinian national non-profit organization. It was founded in Jerusalem in 1998 in response to the urgent need for the Palestinian society to gain an effective means to advance the education process under difficult social and economic conditions created by the Israeli occupation. Its mission is to work with the community, targeting mainly young people and developing alternative resources to formal education.
The Tamer Institute has long prioritized working on oral history as an essential part of its orientation, working with children, adults or writers for this purpose. It aims not only to transmit history by word of mouth from one generation to another, but has made several major attempts to document these stories for posterity. These efforts started just after the Institute was founded, shortly before the Second Intifada. At that time, the Tamer Institute began holding some teaching classes for students, and working as an alternative to formal education entities that were suffering from Israeli attacks and pressure.
Later, it launched the “Small Continent” initiative, which was one of the first to prioritize oral history. It is a voluntary, community-based initiative, by which many groups of young people explore natural archaeological and historical areas in Palestine, and then document their experiences in an oral history format. Groups recorded extensively using words and graphics about those experiences, and Tamer compiled and released them in a guide to the locations they visited, in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The importance of this initiative lies in the revival of the natural link between young people and the historical and natural environment in Palestine, and the emphasis on communication, thus discovering the real value of those sites in Palestine. This initiative has been stalled since 2001 because of the closures and checkpoints, as well as the escalation of Israeli attacks, especially during the second Palestinian uprising in 2000.
Following this experience, the Tamer Institute continues in its attempts to create greater awareness of the importance of oral history by training many youngsters, such as members of the Araat Team in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and working to teach them research methodologies that will facilitate oral history projects.
The outcomes of this experience are many. For instance, in terms of books, the group has published the following: Oral History of the Palestinian, Yalu, Jericho: A Day Trip and Ten Thousand Years, A Palestinian on the Road, A History of Palestinian Photography for Adolescents, Cities Narrating their History, From Jerusalem the Tale Begins and From Ebal to Mina We Sing Our Songs, among others.
Other experiments were the product of research groups of youths and children. Yalu, a history of Yalu village, was prepared by a group of children: Ibaa Mghari (thirteen years), Nadia Aruri (twelve years), Celine Khoury (twelve years) and Razan Ayoubi (twelve years), led by Palestinian writer Sonia An-Nimer. The book Jericho: A Day Trip and Ten Thousand Years was prepared by the youth movement Small Continent, under the supervision of the Palestinian writer and artist Salman Natour. The book From Ebal to Mina We Sing Our Songs was published in 2013 and was the result of the efforts of a group of young Palestinians from different parts of Palestine: Tulkarem, Ramallah and Gaza. There was also another project for young men which was documented in a book entitled Cities Narrating their History, dealing with a similar theme to From Ebal to Mina We Sing Our Songs.
Involving youths in collecting, recording and preserving the Palestinian narrative in the Gaza Strip is a form of resistance, rejecting the Israeli fabrications of history which deny the Palestinian people their right to their lands. The younger generation’s contribution to such projects is of special importance; they are the future generations who will lead the Palestinian resistance movement.
ERASURE NARRATIVES
After addressing the future of oral history, it is important to discuss how erasure narratives make oral history study both difficult to carry out and vitally important. Attempts to maintain the work of oral history are reaching Palestinians in their various locations. The efforts of the different Tamer groups in different locations ‒ Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip ‒ and their communications with researchers in other areas actually transcend the divisions enforced by the Israeli occupation, through practical coordination and joint planning, including by youth of the Araat teams. The combination of and collaboration between these groups that are divided by geopolitical distance is an important step in the direction of forging a nation, and this is documented by the new style of writings, which emerged from the different communities of Palestine into one body of work, as in the books From Ebal to Mina and Cities Narrating their History, as well as others put together by youths from different regions.
In the same context of the future of oral history in Gaza, Israel’s continuous attacks on Gaza and the ethnic cleansing that has resulted, have produced a paradigm of resistance, accompanied by hope, that continue to haunt all Palestinian generations. Hope for the future, return
and freedom, are themes that not even the Israelis can deny the Palestinians. This hope can be clearly seen through projects run by the young Palestinians, as in the Tamer Institute, documenting the Palestinian history.
In an excerpt from Journey to Jerusalem by Grace Halsell, an award-winning journalist, there is a conversation in a refugee camp with a school administrator, asking what is needed for a better situation. “Our freedom! Our freedom!”, he replies emphatically. Nowadays, the young and the old inspire each other; from the elderly in their seventies and eighties, to school students, all are seen in the streets of the West marching for a free Palestine. Inside Palestine, it is rather the school students leading demonstrations and other types of resistance. Yet this does not preclude the psychological effects of the prolonged stays in camps which might lead to, as the administrator mentioned, an increased tendency towards passivity. “With loss of self-confidence and increased dependence … But this hatred builds on their lack of freedom. Israel forcibly produces a generation of tongueless people, and we will, in the end, speak with fire” (Halsell 1981).
Attempts by Israel to remove the map of Palestine from the world’s geography and to obliterate the memory of the Nakba from world consciousness, using its institutional and legal power for this purpose, although continuous, are thus far in vain (Masalha 2012: 9). Official Israeli insistence on ignoring and denying the Palestinian Nakba has never stopped. The legal ban on Nakba commemorations by Palestinians through the Nakba Law of 2011 is just one example. The siege on Gaza, disconnecting the Palestinians in Gaza from the rest of the world and making it hard for researchers there to receive training on oral history, or equipment that would facilitate its gathering, is another challenge.
Projects of oral history in Gaza have limitations. The major threat is the Israeli occupation trying to whitewash its crimes by, for instance, changing the original names of Palestinian villages and streets, and limiting access to all archives that have links to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Also the Israelis use their settler-colonial, heritage-style cultural strategy, based on biblical archaeology studies and supported by a retrospective assembly of archaeological fragments, including, but not limited to, bones, tombs and officially approved historical and “archaeological theme parks” of artefacts and monuments. In addition to these threats to the Palestinian narrative, little work has been done in the conceptual area of oral history (for example Masalha 2008: 123‒156); most studies by scholars have focused on raw data of specific areas of research. Additionally, many such works have been done in Arabic, a further barrier to those who do not speak the language.
Nevertheless, it is important that such initiatives have flourished, given that refugees who witnessed the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine are declining in number. Haidar Eid of the Gaza-based Oral History Project, and an assistant professor at al-Aqsa University of Gaza, explained this challenge. “We started thinking about how the generation that survived the Nakba are leaving us … Most of these people are dying” (Catron 2013). Eid, a refugee, spoke about his own original village, to show the importance of oral history for the Palestinian account,
I’m from a village called Zarnuga, which is on the outskirts of Ramle [in present-day Israel]. I found only three pictures of Zarnuga … The history of the Tantura massacre relies heavily on oral history. Now people know that a massacre took place in the Tantura village, about 30 kilometres south of Haifa, based on recorded oral history. (Catron 2013)
This indicates the need for more extensive work on this subject in order to maintain the Palestinian narratives, providing the younger generation with a more accurate narrative of Palestinian history.
Shahin notes that obstacles facing oral history projects in the Gaza Strip include the limited knowledge on how to conduct oral history research; sometimes, researchers do not have sufficient information to discuss their accounts meaningfully with the narrators. Secondly, Shahin believes there is a lack of specialists in oral history, people who are qualified in scientific dialogue management. He had lately participated in a course on the methodology of oral history in Jordan, with two others from the West Bank. Shahin ends on a hopeful note, urging the Palestinians to invest in the oral history of the Nakba because, in his words, “this will prove our [legal] right to our land in international courts”.
The hope is also linked to international grassroots movements that prioritize the right of return for all Palestinian refugees, as in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which has proved to be a successful method of resistance. One of its three major points is the right of return to all Palestinian refugees, implementing the UN Resolution 194, calling for return for all refugees to their Palestinian lands which they were forced to leave in 1948, or their compensation. Much of the BDS work is coordinated in Gaza, with the Gaza-based professor Haidar Eid sitting on the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) steering committee. Eid mentioned in a previous conversation that none of those interviewed for the Oral History Project he is part of agrees with compensation; all want to return to their lands. There is a consensus on this issue. Young volunteers conduct most of the interviews for the Oral History Project, and many belong to PACBI’s youth affiliate (Catron 2013), once again emphasizing the importance of young Palestinians leading the way in such projects.
CONCLUSION
The Israeli premier Golda Meir once said “There are no Palestinian people” (Jerusalem Post International, 8‒14 June 1980, in Masalha 2000: 244), but this could not make the Palestinians disappear; no power on earth can stop people from resisting outside rule. Israel, with all its national and international power, has failed to stop Gazan refugees from dreaming of a better future that entails a return to their homeland. For Palestinians, remembering the Nakba is not a choice which can be selected or deselected at will. It is an existential state of being, as it “is central to their social history and collective identity” (Masalha 2012: 7); it remains at the “heart of Palestinians’ collective memory, national identity and the struggle for collective national rights” (Masalha 2012: 208). Herein lies the importance of bringing the Nakba into all Palestine-related discussions.
With the continuous Israeli attempts to attack and delegitimize Palestinian memory, hope seems to be a major factor that all refugees share, despite the odds against achieving the possibility of return. For Palestinian refugees, memory of the past represents the fuel for their survival, and acts as a force in maintaining and reproducing their rights as the sole owners of Palestine. It serves to keep them and their identity alive, and feeds their hope for a fair future. This memory and collective memory is critical, since a nation without memory and without culture is a nation without history (in reality, it cannot be a nation at all). For Palestinians who, after the creation of Israel, were scattered around the world or internally displaced, resistance through hope has functioned as a driving force in their commitment to fight for justice and against occupation, with the confidence to return to their homeland (Abdo 2014: 99‒100). This is clearly symbolized in the young Palestinian generation, which is feeling suffocated, especially if living in refugee camps, but is at the same time politically active and vocal. This is in contrast to their contemporaries in the West, for instance, who are not equally politically aware, despite international student and public activism gatherings throughout the year. Living under occupation is indeed a major factor in this difference.
Importantly, this research serves to emphasize why oral history studies are a vital process in the Palestinian socio-political context. The Palestinian oral narrative speaks for itself; it is important to maintain this narrative for generations to come, as it contains within it important evidence for Palestinians’ right to return to what once was their land, Palestine.
NOTES
1In this study, the use of “Gaza” usually refers to the entire Gaza Strip.
REFERENCES
Abdo, N. (2014) Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System. Lond
on: Pluto Press.
BADIL (2012) http://www.badil.org/phocadownloadpap/Badil_docs/publications/Survey2012.pdf.
Bisharat, G. (2007) “For Palestinians, Memory Matters”, http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/For-Palestinians-memory-matters-It-provides-a-2560742.php.
Catron, J. (2013) “Gaza Researchers Determined to Record Nakba Generation Before Time Runs Out”, https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-researchers-determined-record-nakba-generation-time-runs-out/12872.
Cook, J. (2009) “Canada Park and Israeli ‘memoricide’”, https://electronicintifada.net/content/canada-park-and-israeli-memoricide/8126.
Doumani, B. (2009) “Archiving Palestine and the Palestinians: The Patrimony of Ihsan Nimr”, Jerusalem Quarterly (36): 3‒12, http://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/archiving_0.pdf.
Hajjaj, T. (2015) “The Oldest Man in Gaza: ‘Back in the Old Days, Your Home Was Yours’, http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/palestinian-oral-history-978259534.
Halsell, G., (1981) ‘Life in a Palestinian Refugee Camp”, excerpted from Journey to Jerusalem, http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/ref-halsell.html.
Hastings, T. (2016) “Palestinian Oral History as a Tool to Defend Against Displace-ment”, https://al-shabaka.org/commentaries/palestinian-oral-history-tool-defend-displacement/.
Masalha, N (2000) Imperial Israel and the Palestinians. London: Pluto, https://goo.gl/q5oKun.
Masalha, N. (2008) “Remembering the Palestinian Nakba: Commemoration, Oral History and Narratives of Memory”, Holy Land Studies 7(2): 123‒156.
Masalha, N. (2012) The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed Books.
MIFTAH (2003) http://www.miftah.org/Doc/Articles/2004/Mar18bI2k4.html.
Muhanna, E. (2016) “The Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies”, https://goo.gl/1IsieA.
An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba Page 37